Stiff Upper Lip
by lionesseyes13
Summary: Times change, but do people? If Kel attended a boarding school in the modern world, would she still have the guts to stand up against hazing? Oneshot written for August Challenge at TPE.


Author's Note: This was written for the August Challenge over at the Tamora Pierce Writing Experiment forum, which was to re-write a scene from one of Pierce's books in the modern era. Hopefully, everyone will enjoy this piece, and everybody should be aware that this fic was intended in a largely humorous light, so nothing here is actually intended to offend anybody...

Stiff Upper Lip

All was silent in the hallowed halls of Taft Preparatory Academy, a prestigious boarding school along the Maryland side of the Chesapeake Bay within a half hour's ride of Washington D.C. As Keladry Mindelan strode as quickly as she could down the corridors without disrupting the hush that had finally fallen over the academy as curfew rapidly approached, she couldn't help but admire the way the gray marble imbedded with streaks of azure and rose glinted in the light cast by the golden chandeliers spaced at regular intervals along every passageway.

Not for the first time, she found herself thinking that the place was more like a grand hotel of the type that her father, who had worked as a diplomat in Japan for the past two decades, was accustomed to staying in while on trips for the state.

Here, costly mahogany was used for the furniture, the computer labs were packed with a variety of the latest tech learning devices, and the beds were piled with thick, soft covers. Expert chefs prepared the food which would not have been out of place in an exclusive New York restaurant. The gymnasium contained extensive exercise equipment, several tennis courts, a basketball court, and a track as well as three pools of varying depths and temperatures.

All the luxury was nice, Kel admitted inwardly, but part of her still found all the creature comforts disconcerting. As the daughter of a diplomat raised among the simple beauty of Asian architecture, she had grown to love simple things.

Besides, she thought, all the luxury did not disguise the lack of freedom. There was no denying that the students were subject to strict security regulations. They could not leave the school grounds without authorization. Masters took attendance at the start of every lesson, and anyone so much as a minute tardy would receive demerits and detention. Roving cameras, concealed in the chandeliers, constantly swept the hallways, looking for any sign of a threat to the safety of the elite leaders of tomorrow—America's future senators, governors, CEO's of Fortune Five Hundred Corporations, and media tycoons.

This was the world that Kel—a girl with dreamy hazel eyes—was daring to infiltrate. Ever since its inception, Taft Preparatory Academy had been an all-boy's school. It was only the considerable donation and diplomacy of her father as well as the desire of Taft's board of directors for the academy to be perceived as modern rather than as some ancient bastion of America's blue bloods that had enabled her to attend the school at all.

Kel could have gone to any number of excellent co-ed and all-girls' boarding schools, but she had wanted to attend her father's alma mater. Taft was the best private school. Every year, more than half of its graduating students continued onto Harvard, Brown, Princeton, or Yale. Even its dimmest graduates were assured a place at Georgetown, Swathmore, West Point, or Annapolis.

Technically, a handful of private schools that were open to girls were considered every bit as good as Taft to college admissions boards, but it was all equality of theory, not reality. In reality, people still pictured all girl's schools as places where young ladies learned to pour tea and curtsy, since most of these academies had been founded during the Victorian era when such skills had been all the rage, and co-ed schools were viewed as places where privileged children learned how to have sex with each other but didn't learn much else.

On paper, a degree from Miss Hall's might have been as wonderful as one from Taft's, but that was only because the admissions boards at the Ivy Leagues still believed that girls couldn't really perform as well academically as boys. It was the same as with the Girl Scout Gold Award and the Boy Scout Eagle Award, Kel thought. Everybody said that the Gold Award and the Eagle Award were equally spectacular achievements, but everyone secretly believed that the Gold Award was easier to earn than the Eagle Award, and so the Eagle Award was better.

Kel wanted the best-not just the best that a woman could get, but the best that a man or a woman could—and she didn't wish to be denied it just because of her body's plumbing. That was why she had insisted on coming to Taft.

There were times, though, when she regretted attending the all-boys' academy, and, as she passed the library on her way back to her dorm for lights-out, she toppled head over heels into the black hole of one of those occasions.

She heard the slam of a heavy book, which probably cost more than many Hispanic immigrants earned in a year, striking the floor, and stopped abruptly, adrenaline spiking through her veins like marijuana. Almost as soon as she had entered Taft, she had discovered that nothing was ever accidental here. If somebody dropped a book, it was because he had been pushed, or because he intended to force some underling into picking it up.

Doubtlessly, she thought, some older boys were engaging in Taft's greatest tradition—hazing. Hazing was as much a part of life at Taft as breathing was. Despite the lectures on encouraging self-esteem in others and the importance of ending the vicious cycle of bullying that the school psychologist offered on a regular basis after Assembly, hazing was tacitly approved of by the masters at Taft. All the Masters felt that the purpose of the academy was to transform boys into men, and real men did not complain. Real men defended themselves or suffered in stoic silence. Taft was intended to teach boys how to develop the stiff upper lip so prized in polite society.

"Pick that up for me, will you, Merric?" Joren Stone's icy voice, as frigid as the wind that swept through his family's Vermont mountain estates, made his words far more of an order than a question.

Reflexively, Kel flinched. Joren was a junior on the rowing team whose favorite hobby happened to be bullying anyone younger than him, and Merric, Joren's current victim, was famous for his knack of offending the biggest bully on the block just by existing.

Her heart drumming against her rib cage, Kel stuck her head through the open door, and watched as Merric, his face as crimson as his flaming Irish hair, bent to scoop up the tome Joren had deliberately dropped.

"Yessir. Right away, sir," muttered Merric dully, placing the massive volume on the table off which Joren had just knocked it.

Once he had done so, Zahir ibn Alhaz, the son of a wealthy oil baron from Arabia and Joren's closest companion, shoved another heavy book off the table onto the floor. Privately, Kel had always found it remarkable that Joren, a conservative WASP, should be best friends with Zahir, a devout Muslim. Perhaps, both were united by their right-wing political beliefs, and maybe Zahir was determined to bully others before they could rip into him for daring to be a religious and ethnic majority in a school designed by and for white Christians.

"Pick it up," commanded Vinson Genlith, whose strongest muscle was far more likely to be his bicep than his brain, and who often resorted to repeating Joren, whom he followed like an extremely ugly puppy, as a result. Looking at his thick frame through her long eyelashes, Kel thought that it was no mystery why Vinson hung out with Joren. On his surface and at his core, Vinson Genlith was a thug, and he was attracted to anyone who could provide him with beings to torment in much the same way moths were drawn to the lamps that killed them. "Can't have books on the floor."

Merric, whose Irish heritage, as far as Kel had noticed over the past few weeks, had revealed itself more in a love of music and poetry than a love of fighting, glared at the older boys resentfully before picking up the book and returning it to the table.

Immediately after Merric had placed Zahir's tome back on the table, Joren pushed his volume off the table. As Merric stared bitterly at him, Joren lifted a smaller stack of books. Smirking, he kept his eyes riveted on Merric's burning face as he let the books topple one by one to the floor.

Kel's throat tightened, and she swallowed hard. Unfortunately, that only made her stomach clench like a fist instead. Taking a deep breath through her now mercifully unclogged throat, she walked into the library with all the confidence she could muster.

"This is wrong," she snapped, halting in front of the table of boys tormenting Merric. Right now, she didn't care what her Masters might say. All she knew was that real men never bullied others. Real men had enough sense of their own value not to feel the compulsion to drag anybody else down. As far as she was concerned, any Master who punished her for standing up to a knot of bullies bigger than she was could accept the fact that they would never be the man that she was.

"Oh, look—it's the Lump." On the other side of the table, a leering Vinson rose to his feet. "Do you want trouble, girl? We'd just love to give it to you."

"No, I don't want it," Kel replied evenly, never breaking eye contact with Joren, because she understood that the leader of the gang was always the one to watch, since the others would take their cues from him. "What I want is for you to stop pushing the freshmen around."

His blue eyes bright under his blond hair, Joren cocked his head at her, remarking thoughtfully, "I see. We haven't gotten rid of you yet, so you think you're accepted." Then, still keeping his eyes on Kel, who decided that she wouldn't be intimidated by the hint that Joren and his crowd were responsible for all the possessions in her room that had been broken or stolen over the course of the semester, Joren spat at Merric, "Pick up those books, Merric."

"Don't, Merric," Kel said, her attention fixated on Joren.

"It's the custom," the red-headed boy mumbled.

"Not like this, it's not," Kel answered briskly. "Us fetching and carrying books and sports equipment is enough. Forcing people to pick up things dropped on purpose has nothing to do with being a freshman."

Shaking his head, Joren laughed softly. "Oh, this is too much. The yellow Lump—our very temporary annoyance—will school us in proper behavior."

"I shouldn't have to," Kel told him, bristling. "You should know how a proper gentleman behaves. Doesn't your family pride itself on its generations of refined ladies and gentlemen?"

"What would you know about refinement?" sneered Joren. "Your father attended here on scholarship. No matter how much gold he coats himself in, he will still be disgustingly common, just like you. New money can never be as good as old money, and new money looks all the more foolish when it tries to be, I assure you."

Kel opened her mouth to retort, but, suddenly, she found that she didn't have the oxygen necessary to do so. A hand had clamped around the back of her neck, preventing her from breathing.

"Shall I take the Lump away?" Zahir, whom Kel hadn't even heard get out of his chair, asked Joren, clutching Kel's neck even more tightly.

Desperately, before she fainted, Kel summoned the remains of her fleeting energy and jammed her thumbnail into the base of Zahir's. As he released her with an astonished yelp, Joren lunged for her.

Thanking God that she had studied karate while she was in Japan, Kel stepped away from him, and managed to duck a punch from Zahir, who had recovered from her assault. Zahir's fist hit Joren instead of her, and she retreated to the open center of the library, noting with relief that Merric had fled from the scene. It was nice to only have to worry about her own skin, not his, in this battle, since she was already overmatched. Of course, it had been worry about his skin, not hers, that had gotten her into this mess at all, but she had only acted as any decent being would have.

Zahir, whose punch had connected solidly with Joren's skull, was cursing and coddling his fist. Joren was massaging the spot on his head where his friend had struck as he surged toward Kel. He was flushed with rage, and Vinson was nowhere to be seen.

Something clattered behind her, and, instinctively, she glanced over her shoulder to see that Vinson had tripped over a footstool as he emerged from shelves at her rear.

Quickly, she spun back around to see Joren leaping straight at her. Her karate training seizing control of her body, she grabbed onto Joren's shirt and pivoted, kneeling as she did so. He went flying over her shoulder, belly-flopped onto a study table, and slid along its polished length before finally crashing headfirst into a bookshelf.

Before she could gloat over her victory in any capacity, a foot slammed into her back between her shoulder blades. Rolling forward as she fell down, Kel saw that Zahir was back in the fray.

When Zahir moved in to kick her again, she seized his foot. Growling with the effort, she twisted until he stumbled, and then took advantage of his faltering footwork to chuck a nearby stool at him.

Covering his head with his arms, he tugged his foot out of her grasp at last, as Vinson gripped her ankles and dragged her forward.

Kel sat up and grabbed Vinson's hands, but, before she could do anything else, Joren had grasped her hair from behind and yanked her to the floor again. Ignoring the pain that coursed through her body as Joren maintained his grip on her hair and she dodged another blow from Vinson, she clung to his wrists to prevent him from tugging out a chunk of her hair—or her scalp, as he seemed likely to do if he yanked on her hair just a little harder.

Somehow, she freed herself from Vinson's hold on her leg, which afforded her the opportunity to kick Vinson's belly before Joren's savage pull on her hair forced her back onto the floor.

Feeling for his wrist with her fingers, Kel dug her thumbnails into the yielding flesh between his bones. Cursing, he released her, and she lurched to her feet.

She charged the grinning Zahir and received a punch in the stomach as a reward.

Another hit from Joren slapped into her back, spinning her around, and his next punch whacked her in the face.

She was just contemplating how many teeth would be knocked out of her mouth tonight when Master Yayin, who apparently had been patrolling the corridors nearby, stuck his head into the library, barking, "Back to your dorms. It's ten demerits and a hundred lines if you are caught out after curfew, you know."

Then, as he stepped into the room and saw the frozen tableau of what had been a heated battle, his expression of chronic suspicion and disapproval hardened into one of absolute ire. "Brawling amongst all these books," he gasped, apparently almost speechless with wrath. "You should all be ashamed of the complete lack of respect you have shown this evening for the quality of education you receive here at Taft. Fighting in libraries should be reserved for inner-city schools plagued with poverty. It should not be seen in the finest boarding school in America."

Puffing himself up like a penguin whose iceberg had been trespassed upon, Master Yayin concluded in his most severe tone, "I will be escorting all of you to Headmaster Cavall now. Only he can determine an appropriate punishment for your disgraceful conduct."

An hour later, Kel was sitting on a plush sofa outside Headmaster Cavall's office, watching as Vinson, the last of the older boys to emerge from the headmaster's study, walked away down the hallway.

Through the headmaster's open door, she heard the man call, "Keladry Mindelan."

Reminding herself that no punishment she received would ever make her feel bad about protecting the rights of another human being, she stepped into Headmaster Cavall's office. As she halted in front of his desk, the headmaster inspected her and shook his head.

Kel wasn't surprised at his reaction. She knew that she looked about as dreadful as a zombie. Judging by the throbbing in her eye, she had blacked it, and, based on how uneven her lips felt when she pressed them together, a bruise must be forming on at least one of them. Her nose felt like it was broken. A sickening, lukewarm trickle down her cheeks also told her that the splits in both her eyebrows were bleeding.

"Blot that," Headmaster Cavall commanded her curtly, pushing a box of Kleenex to her across his mahogany desk.

For a second, Kel stared at it as if she had never laid eyes on tissues in her life. Then, her left arm hurting every inch of the way, she reached for it, snatched up a tissue as the skin on her knuckles tore still further, and dabbed the blood away from her face with the tissue.

"Would you care to explain?" Arching an eyebrow at her in a manner that informed her quite clearly that nothing short of Word War III would justify fistfighting in his academy, Headmaster Cavall picked up a mug of tea and sipped from it.

"Sir?" she asked thickly, wiping the blood off her cheeks. Now was the time to play stupid, because to confess that she had fought against the hazing that pervaded Taft was to set herself against the sort of school traditions that the headmaster esteemed so much. Headmaster Cavall was the type of person, it seemed, who had an abiding affection for customs that involved tormenting young people. He was the sort of gentleman who thought that boys could only become men through intense suffering.

"How were you injured?" He shot her a withering glance. "I seem to recall that you were in one piece earlier tonight."

"I fell down, Headmaster." She tried to breathe through her nose, winced, and gave it up as a bad job.

"What did you say, girl?" Headmaster Cavall's tone made it obvious that he hated hearing her use the classic excuse of brawling boys. Doubtlessly, he thought that young ladies shouldn't fight at all, and definitely should not use the cover stories of boys when they did.

"I fell," she repeated levelly.

"Come, come, girl." The headmaster gave her a sidelong look as he fiddled with his cup. "You were in a fight. Name those you fought with."

No doubt, he would love for her to break the honored tradition of not revealing the names of those she fought with in addition to shattering the rule about not interfering with any hazing that occurred within Taft's walls.

"Begging your pardon, sir, but there was no fight," she insisted, clenching her jaw and ignoring the spasms of agony that jolted through her as a result. "I fell down."

"You fought with Joren, Zahir, and Vinson." Headmaster Cavall's lips thinned.

"Did they say that?" Kel managed to keep her face as blank as an empty canvass. "How strange. I fell down."

"I imagine that you have now come to your senses." The headmaster's fingers drummed an accompaniment to his words on his desk. "Surely, you wish to attend an all-girls school where you only have to worry about catfights and not fistfights. At this point in the semester, it will be difficult to transfer, as I warned you and your father when the board of directors first granted you permission to attend here, but—"

Horrified enough at the idea that he would believe she was ready to quit going to Taft that she forgot her manners, she interrupted him. "No, sir."

"It will not be difficult?" Headmaster Cavall's nostrils flared. "Girl, I have taught at this school for thirty years, and at other respected academies throughout the country for another twenty years. I flatter myself that I know a tad more about the running of boarding schools than you do. If I say that transferring will be hard, it will be."

"I meant that I didn't want to transfer, sir," explained Kel firmly. "I don't want to attend an all-girls school. I wish to go here."

"You do not want to transfer," he repeated, his forehead furrowing.

"That's right." Kel nodded. "And I don't believe that falling down is an offense for which I can be expelled."

"You have Saturday detention until April." The headmaster's fingers tapped ever more loudly on his desk. "I also expect an essay each week on the value of using words instead of fists to resolve disputes, something that I think your father, being a diplomat, would appreciate this school teaching you, as he seems to have failed to do so. Speaking of your father, you should know that, if you had attended here in his day, you would be getting caned right now, but the board of directors fifteen years ago decided that corporal punishment was bad for business, so the cane, however useful it may be at keeping raucous young people in line, is no longer used here."

It was on the tip of Kel's tongue to ask if he really would have caned somebody for daring to defend an innocent boy from a gang of bullies. However, looking into his stern face, she decided that the question was idiotic. Of course, he would have caned someone for doing that. Obviously, the headmaster appreciated any traditions that allowed a stronger person to beat the daylights out of a weaker person.

If the board of directors permitted it, he probably would have caned any boy who had the audacity to resist hazing, and then taken a perverse pleasure in imagining the lad's pain as the boy sat down in classes the next day. Hitting others to prove that violence wasn't the answer wouldn't seem like the height of stupidity and hypocrisy to him.

Biting her lip against a thousand insults that she longed to hurl like thunderbolts at the callous headmaster, she thought bitterly that Headmaster Cavall could criticize her for using fists instead of her words to resolve problems with bullies, but the only reason that bullies flourished in his school was because he never attempted to stamp out any sort of hazing. She had to fight bullies herself because she knew that none of the masters in the school would listen to her if she complained about hazing. If the administration wasn't going to protect her and the other freshmen, she would have to do it herself. All she could be grateful for, then, was that Taft had shown her just how many ways one could keep a stiff upper lip.


End file.
